Apart from motherboards, the only big product segment ASRock made a name for itself is with pre-built mini-PCs. The company wants to put its experience to good use by cashing in for the market's newfound love for compact (mini-ITX) gaming PCs, the ones that save precious real-estate on congested living room TV racks and dorm rooms. Pictured below is the company's first such effort, timed with the launch of Intel's next-generation Core "Haswell" processor, and supporting socket LGA1150 platform based on Z87 Express chipset.

There are three components to ASRock's creation: a unique SFF case, co-designed by BMW Design; the ASRock Z87E-ITX motherboard, and a GeForce GTX 680 graphics card. The case looks pretty slick, coming from BMW. It stays slim by using a PCI-Express riser, allowing you to install graphics cards along the plane of the motherboard. The Z87-E ITX, like most efforts by ASRock in the past, is extremely feature-rich for its size. It uses a 6-phase VRM to power the LGA1150 CPU, features two DDR3 DIMM slots, PCI-Express 3.0 x16 and mini-PCIe 2.0, for the WLAN+Bluetooth card.

Connectivity on the Z87E-ITX includes six SATA 6 Gb/s ports, from which one can be reassigned as eSATA, six USB 3.0 ports (four external, two by headers), 8-channel HD audio with TOSLINK digital output, gigabit Ethernet, PS/2 mouse/keyboard combo, and display outputs that include HDMI, DisplayPort, and DVI. In this system, the three will come handly only if you use Lucid Virtu, allowing you to plug your display to the motherboard, while still harnessing the power of an installed discrete graphics card. The company did not give out pricing/availability information.